Married life is a razor’s walk and in the modern times it demands more understanding, more give-and-take and the male ego has to be more condescending in the initial stages to allow the relationship to grow.
To maintain a façade and to then to have a reality check and reform subsequently is the core edifice of Nitesh Tiwari directed and Sajid Nadiadwala produced BAWAAL. After a long time a film has tried to position a malice of the society-epilepsy, more so if a woman is the sufferer of the infliction.
Watching the movie I was reminded of the same story which I witnessed while I was studying, A relative’s wife suffered from epilepsy, though she was a post graduate, of her times. The husband never tried to be by her side, and she was kicked out. Fortunately she got a new partner who understood her predicament and the lady in question became a teacher herself.
BAWAAL has obliquely tried to portray it in a sensitive manner and factoring in the changing times, the girl in question-Janhvi Kapoor, is bold and confident enough to share it with her future husband under the self-belief that a new relationship should not be based on false premises.
Varun Dhawan, enacts a typical youth of present times from the Hindi heartland, pampered by sidekicks to presume that he is a numero Uno. Seldom does it happen that characters like these are provided with a reality check, but through the cinematic visualization that BAWAAL has portrayed, one hopes that the ivory towers in which male of the variety of present times live, would be shattered to pieces.
Husband-wife duo of Tiwaris (Nitesh and Ashwiny Aiyer) have been trying to contextualize education through their cinematic journey first through CHICHORE and now through BAWAAL. BAWAAL underlines the premise that learning by rote should be interspersed with visual depictions that facilitates in better understanding of the subject as the World War II narrative has been built up in the film.
It is for the first time perhaps that through a film from the world of Hindi cinema a cinematic portrayal of an important historical event has been put before the audience and one only hopes that one would be able to see more such historical milestones being woven into the cinematic scripts in future.
Quite a lot of controversy has been generated about use of the word ‘Auschwitz‘ in the film, but it has been used metaphorically as a sort of concentration camp that was created mentally for the character of Janhvi Kapoor by her husband Varun Dhawan and it need not be linked with the original Auschwitz. It indeed was a mental concentration camp that Jahnhvi Kapoor was portrayed enduring.
While Varun Dhawan continues to aspire to position himself as the new Govinda- a dialogue in the film cheekily underlining the same, and also through his attires as the film moves to different locations in Europe, Janhvi Kapoor has given a competent performance.
The title is apt as it dabbles between BAWAAL at the home front as also the BAWAAL created by Varun Dhawan in the school on account of the facade of being a teacher that he has created who is always on a ego trip.
Now that the government of Japan has requested for BAWAAL to be dubbed in Japanese as well, under the presumption that there is a reference to World War II in a Hindi cinema, it would be interesting to watch out whether Varun Dhawan would be able to create a fan following for himself in Land of the Rising Sun as well.
